Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Contact1.866.878.3231
Login
Try Sprout for Free
Social Media
Platforms
Industries
Career Growth
Marketing Insights
Sprout
Resources
All Topics
Search
Sprout Blog / All Social Media / Social Media Analytics
From follower counts to post engagement percentages, the world of social media metrics can be
confusing to wade into. On top of that, a new important metric seems to be created on a weekly
basis.
What should you be tracking? Is it even important for your business? In this guide, we’ll take
you through the most basic metrics that every company should be paying attention to based on
your goals. These are generalized across social media channels. The names of key metrics can
vary from one channel to another, but we’ll cover the core measurements that you’ll want to stay
on top of for your KPIs, goal setting and campaign tracking.
In this guide, we’ll go over what social media metrics are, why they’re important, how to find
them and which ones you should be paying attention to. Specifics that you track will vary by
industry, business and campaigns. Consider these as the basic metrics to build your approach to
social media analytics around.
What are social media metrics and why should you
track them?
Your social media goals are what determine your metrics. For every goal, you need a related
metric, which will help determine if your social strategy is hitting the mark or not.
For example, your business goal may be to increase conversions. Therefore, your social media
goal becomes increasing conversions from those that visit your site via posts that are part of your
strategy. Now that you have a goal in mind, you can clearly identify which social media metrics
to measure and a time frame in which to measure them. For example, increasing conversions
from social by 25% in a three-month span. To meet this goal, you decide to run a campaign that
will include ads, product tags and influencers. To measure this, you determine that you’ll look at
the social traffic and conversion rate metric from those posts in your website analytics.
Social media metrics are important because they prove you can measure how successful a
campaign is, how well your social strategy is performing, and ultimately if you will have an
impact on your overall business. Not only does having these metrics give you an opportunity to
showcase the impact of your work to executives, but providing consistent social media metric
reports can lead to major shifts for your social team, including budget increases and increased
access to resources. And last but certainly not least, metrics keep you aware of general social
profile and brand health – you don’t know the impact of your social media presence until you
have the data to back it up.
If you’re just starting out and have a low budget, visiting these native analytics resources
individually can be a good starting point.
In order to minimize the time investment of pulling metrics from all these sources, find a social
media analytics tool that fits within your budget and needs. The time you save on manually
creating reports and pulling together different networks’ data will more than make up for the
money you spend on these tools.
In Sprout, all plans come with presentation-ready social media reports, filterable by platform
and date. This means customized graphs and comparisons to a previous date range are all easily
accessible to you and easy to surface up to team leaders and executives.
Whichever route you take, it’s essential to monitor and document your metrics somewhere on a
consistent basis and track your progress toward your goals.
Now that you know your goals and how to get your data, narrowing down metrics in a sea of
options can be a challenge. Social data is so vast. We’ve used conversions as one example.
However, what about some of the fluffier metrics? How should you be using those? The answer
is about tying the metrics back to your goals. If you’re looking to drive awareness through
publishing, how many impressions are you driving? If you’re looking to build a community, how
many people do your posts engage on average? All metrics have meaning, it’s about interpreting
what that metric tells you and translating that back to your business goals.
High engagement rates will indicate audience health (how responsive your audience is and how
many are “real” followers), interesting content types and your awareness of your brand.
Like most metrics, looking at one engagement metric might not give you all the context you need
to make full decisions for your strategy. Looking at a combination of metrics is a great way to
learn more about what levers you can pull to meet your specific goals. For example, a post that
receives a lot of likes but not comments or shares isn’t always bad. The post intention could’ve
been to present a beautiful image and a caption that isn’t meant to be a call to action. But, if there
was a call to action that encouraged comments and shares, then the lack of them could mean a
poorly performing caption.
Looking at the full picture is great as your devising your strategy, but keeping a close eye on one
metric in particular can really help you be more agile and pivot your strategy quickly. Sprout’s
Sent Message Performance report will break down each post’s metrics but also provide an
average or total at the top of each column. By sorting these, you’ll find out which posts receive
the most impressions and which have the most average users engaged. If engagement is your
goal, sorting by the most engaged posts will help you find similarities among these posts, so you
can determine which elements of these posts appeal most to people and optimize your future
content.
Once you know the most important metrics for every situation, make reporting easier with
Sprout Social.
Presentation-ready reports let you break down data across channels or on specific networks to
highlight social success.
Find out how easy it is to analyze your social strategy with a free trial.
If you’re using these metrics as benchmarks for your brand, it’s important to understand
the difference between reach and impressions.
In this example, the Tweet has a very high Reach because it has over 50k Retweets. To calculate
the reach, we would need to add up every account that Retweeted it and their follower counts.
The engagement rate is also high: it has thousands of Replies, Retweets, Likes, etc. The analytics
we can’t see from the public view would include clicks to expand the Tweet, Quote-Retweets
and profile visits. However, even from what we can see publicly, this is a wildly successful
Tweet.
Improving your share of voice is likely an ongoing goal, one that you measure by benchmarking
over time. Campaigns come and go, but your brand is forever. Unless you’re the only company
in your field, you won’t always be able to maintain the biggest share of voice but you can keep
track of how it ebbs and flows over time and consider the factors for those changes.
In Sprout, you can link your Google Analytics account and it’ll display the traffic sources and
any Twitter mentions that have a link to your site.
Referrals are how a user lands on your website. In web analytics, you’ll see them broken down
into sources. “Social” is usually the source/medium you’ll be monitoring, and then it’s broken
down by network.
Conversions is when someone purchases something from your site. A social conversion means
they visited via a social media channel and then purchased something in that same visit.
Hand in hand with referrals and conversions is the click-through rate (CTR) in ads and posts. A
high CTR means an effective ad. Note that CTRs differ wildly across industries, networks and
content types. It’s best to research industry benchmarks beforehand and then monitor your ads
and adjust accordingly.
This is where metrics like response rate and response time come in. They track how fast your
team is responding to important messages and how many of them are actually being responded
to. For multi-user accounts, you should also track how much each person is getting done.
In the Sprout Engagement report, you’ll see a variety of metrics that include response rate and
response rate, further broken down by day of week. If your social strategy goal is to respond to
everything within six hours and the report says otherwise, then you’ll know what you need to
work on.
The Sprout Team report shows the above metrics but sorted by team members. With these
metrics, you’ll be able to see who’s exceeding the expected time to respond and whose published
posts are receiving the most replies.
Conclusion
Among the dozens of social media metrics that are available to you to track, we’ve compiled the
most essential ones that matter for most businesses and most goals. To recap, metrics are
important because they tell if you a campaign or strategy is successful over time. You can find
metrics in your native channel analytics’s section or through an all-in-one program like Sprout.
The most common and often important metrics to pay attention to are engagement, impressions
and reach, share of voice, referrals and conversions and response rate and time. These combined
will give you a 360º view of your social media performance. With time and new goals, you’ll
add new and more nuanced metrics to make them more relevant to your business.
What social metrics do you consider key to your strategy? How have you tracked them over the
course of your campaigns? Share with us @SproutSocial or in the comments!
Categories
Customer Care
Leveling Up
Social Listening
Social Media Analytics
Social Media Content
Social Media Engagement
Sprout in Action
Jenn Chen
Jenn Chen is an SF-based digital strategist, photographer, and writer who works with specialty
coffee companies to make them look awesome online. She also has a penchant for cake donuts.
Connect with her online @thejennchen & at jennchen.com.
The Social Media Metrics Map (Free Resource)
The Sprout Social Index, Edition XVI: Above & Beyond
Social Marketing Guide: 7 Steps To Creating a Winning Strategy
Categories
o Social Media Analytics
o Social Media Strategy
Categories
o Social Media Analytics
o Social Media Engagement
Categories
o Social Media Analytics
Categories
o Social Media Analytics
How to perform a social media competitive analysis (Free template
included)
Email Us
1.866.878.3231
Office Locations
Support
Help Center
FAQs
System Status
Solutions
Enterprise
Agencies
Small Business
Social Management
Customer Care
Advocacy
Data & Intelligence
Industries
Platform
Social Analytics
Social Engagement
Social Publishing
Social Listening
Social Automation
Social Collaboration
Integrations
Facebook Management
Twitter Management
Instagram Management
LinkedIn Management
Pinterest Management
All Integrations
Company
About Sprout
Why Sprout
Pricing
Careers
Customers
Security
Investors
Resources
Sprout Blog
Resource Center
Partner Directory
Social Image Resizer
Brand Assets
Social Media Guides